Welcome to Erlang/OTP, a complete
development environment
for concurrent programming.

Some hints that may get you started faster

The Erlang programming language is described in the book
Concurrent Programming in Erlang, ISBN 0-13-285792-8, 2nd
edition. The first part of the book is available as a PDF document.
However, the language has evolved since the book was written,
and a more up to date description can be found in the Erlang
Reference Manual. An Erlang tutorial can be found in
Getting Started With Erlang.

Erlang/OTP is divided into a number of OTP applications. An application normally contains
Erlang modules. Some OTP applications,
such as the C interface Erl_Interface, are written in other languages and have no Erlang
modules.

Note that functions that are not imported or prefixed with a module
name belong to the module
erlang
(in the Kernel application).

On a Unix system you can view the manual pages from the command
line using

% erl -man <module>

You can of course use any editor you like to write Erlang
programs, but if you use Emacs there exists editing support such as
indentation, syntax highlighting, electric commands, module name
verification, comment support including paragraph filling, skeletons,
tags support and more. See the Tools application for details.

When developing with Erlang/OTP you usually test your programs
from the interactive shell (see Getting Started With Erlang) where you can call individual
functions. There is also a number of tools available, such as the graphical Debugger, the process
manager Pman and table
viewer TV.

Also note that there are some shell features like history list
(control-p and control-n), in line editing (emacs key bindings) and
module and function name completion (tab) if the module is loaded.